


How the Avengers Found Out About Tony and Natasha

by ITookTheOneLessTravelled



Series: Natalie Rushman 2.0 [3]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Thor is so unsubtle that he has to walk in on them going at it to realize they're dating, mentions of implied rape, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-03
Updated: 2012-08-03
Packaged: 2017-11-11 09:07:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/476896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ITookTheOneLessTravelled/pseuds/ITookTheOneLessTravelled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in five times plus one style on how the Avengers realized that Tony and Natasha were dating. And one person who already knew. Takes place later in the Natalie Rushman 2.0 series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Avengers Found Out About Tony and Natasha

Hulk  
It happened when Tony and Natasha were falling from the sky. He had been flying her to the other side of the battle when some sort of EMP hit them—hard. It knocked out Tony’s suit (but not his arc reactor, thank god—the suit itself protected the arc reactor from being hit by the pulse). But the suit went down, the com link went down, everyone was on their own and Tony and Natasha couldn’t call Thor to catch them.   
So, thinking that they were going to die, Tony pushed his face plate up and kissed her. Seconds later, the pair of them, still tangled together in a mess of useless metal, impacted with a green arm, swinging down and jumping over a building to land with a skid on the street.   
“Spider Lady and Metal Man okay?” Hulk asked after releasing them both to the ground. Tony fell on his ass (because that metal was heavy when the repulsors weren’t working to offset the weight), and Natasha followed him down.   
“Yeah, big guy, we’re fine,” Tony managed. “Thanks for catching us.”  
“Metal Man falls from sky too much,” Hulk insisted. “Metal Man be more careful.”  
Natasha burst out laughing. “He’s got you there, Tony.”  
“Shut up,” Tony muttered.   
“Metal Man and Spider Lady kissing,” Hulk added. “Happy?”  
“Yes, Hulk,” Natasha said indulgently. “Thank you, we’re very happy together.”  
Hulk nodded in satisfaction and turned away, and then turned back. “Metal Man be good to Spider Lady,” he instructed. “Else Hulk have to smash Metal Man, and Hulk like Metal Man.”  
Natasha dissolved into laughter again, and bent to help Tony strip off bits and pieces of armour so that he could stand up, and Hulk leapt away.   
Clint  
Tony and Natasha were best friends. Nobody had seen that coming—the first time that Clint had walked in on them in the kitchen, sitting over coffee cups, with a shared bottle of Irish Cream Liqueur propped between them, laughing about something that had happened at work, he had damn near had a coronary in surprise.   
Oh, Natasha was still very attached to Clint, in ways that couldn’t be duplicated, and Tony was still SCIENCE BROS with Bruce and Pepper was still his bestie, but for some reason, Tony and Natasha identified with each other.   
It was three months of seeing them sharing these moments, dropping inside jokes over the com unit and running into them sitting together all the time before Clint found out why. And he did it by getting into Tony’s file in the SHIELD database.   
Clint had known that Tony had been kidnapped in Afghanistan, held in a cave for three months and forced to build some kind of missile for a terrorist group, but had built the Iron Man Mark I armour instead, and blasted the place apart. He had even theoretically known that Tony had probably been tortured in Afghanistan. But the clinical observations from the debriefing session—shrapnel in his heart (Clint had always been sort of under the impression that Tony had put that arc reactor in his chest simply to prove that he could. But that it actually did something, and that something was running a magnet that kept shrapnel away from his heart was kind of shocking), waterboarding, various hitting and beating, and suspected rape, not that Tony had admitted that to SHIELD’s psychiatrists, but they could recognize the signs when they saw them, well, Tony may have had more extensive experience with torture than Clint himself, and that was saying something. And he had certainly seen enough for Tasha to recognize and identify with that, and to respect him for it.   
Suddenly, the midnight vodka sessions made so much more sense.   
Tony flying Tasha around in the Iron Man suit made sense too.  
Speaking of the moment—Clint glanced out the window of the penthouse sitting room to see Tony land dramatically on the outside edge of the building, sending a laughing Natasha spinning out of his arms. She pushed him towards the mechanism that he used to take the suit off, and clapped delightedly as he walked through the spinning rims, pieces of the suit coming off with each step.   
Then, when he was free of the metal, he draped his arm around Tasha and they walked in together.   
Clint stared, having half a mind to go out there and yell at him—Tasha didn’t behave like that with just anyone. And she was supposed to tell him when she started dating people, really.   
Phil  
“You two want to explain what this is about?”  
“What, exactly, Agent?” Tony asked insolently.  
“Your com chatter. Your conversations. The fact that you’ve been dating for three months, and somehow, I’ve just now realized it!”  
Natasha snorted elegantly. “That’s what really pisses you off, right, Coulson? The fact that you didn’t see? Because you really should be ashamed of yourself. We haven’t mentioned it because we wanted to keep it out of the press, and we thought we’d let you figure it out on your own without fanfare. Clint figured it out a month and a half ago, and it only took him that long because he was away in Barbados for a month of our relationship. Steve’s oblivious, Thor is ignorant of our customs, and Bruce spends too much time in his lab to really see us interact. Hulk knows, though.”  
Phil stared. Tony grinned and took Natasha’s hand. And Natasha didn’t protest.   
“It’s unprofessional,” Coulson finally protested. “You’re on the same team, what if you get distracted?”  
Surprisingly, it was Tony who snapped at this suggestion. “Honestly, Coulson, I doubt even I am going to stand there staring at Tasha’s ass when I’m supposed to be saving Clint from having his head chopped off or anything of the sort. We’ve been dating for three months, and haven’t had any problems. Why would we start?”  
“Stark, you realize that Natasha is an undercover operative for SHIELD, and that she gets a lot of her intel by—“  
“Seducing the mark, yeah, I got that. She did it to me last year, remember?”  
“I didn’t sleep with you.”  
“We’ve had this conversation, Coulson. Privately, with each other. I realize that Tasha sometimes needs to seduce a mark to get what she needs. She’s promised me that she’ll let me see the videos if it’s good.”  
“Sometimes,” Natasha said, shuddering. “It’s really, really bad.”  
Coulson finally laughed. “I didn’t know that you were capable of keeping the fact that you’re getting laid under the lid for three months, Stark.”  
Steve  
Tony and Natasha were chatting over the com line, and it was driving everyone insane. Coulson was insisting loudly on radio silence, but he had failed to break up the conversation that everyone else was utterly failing to follow.   
“Well, if you’re so worried about Happy hearing, maybe you should let me take you in the suit, then we won’t need a driver,” Tony was saying.   
“Oh, please, Stark. Happy wouldn’t spill my secrets, Happy likes me too damn much. And I’m not letting you take me to a conference in the Iron Man suit, it’s unprofessional.”  
“You know what else is unprofessional? Hiring an undercover assassin to be my PA.”  
“Iron Man, Black Widow,” Coulson snapped loudly. “Get back into the battle. Captain, report.”  
“Evil robots trying to destroy the city, sir,” Steve recited dutifully, hurling his shield into the fray.   
“Hey, Tasha,” Tony interjected. “I bet I can blow up more than you.”  
“Please, Stark,” Natasha shot back.   
“Code names on the com link only, please,” Coulson whined, soundly like a plaintive child. “You’re uplinked to the SHIELD interface, please remember that the Director could be listening in at any time, and potentially the World Security Council. Black Widow, you know better than this. He may be a civilian, but you are not.”  
“I am not a civilian!” Tony called in an affronted tone, right along the same time as he shot a bunch of missile-things at a group of the robots and sent them all blowing up. “Tasha, am I civilian?”  
“No, dear,” Natasha said condescendingly. “Of course not.”  
Steve could practically see Tony pouting. “Baby, you’re wounding me here.”  
“Baby, please,” Tony’s tone induced a flashback, right when they had all moved into the tower, and before Tony and Pepper had mutually decided that just because they were having sex didn’t make them ‘in a relationship’, and that they really behaved more like friends with benefits. Then Pepper had met someone (even Tony didn’t know who) and they had quit with the benefits part. That plaintive tone, Tony’s ‘girlfriend’ tone.   
Which, of course, meant that Tony and Natasha were dating. No, that was ridiculous. Right after Steve had met her, she had told Loki that love was for children. They couldn’t be dating, could they?  
“Aww, sweetie.” Natasha didn’t just call people by pet names. Not even Clint, and she had been friends with Clint for years. “If I go with you to get ice cream later, will you stop whining?”  
They were dating. It was official. Or maybe Steve had lost his mind—not that this was the first time that he had thought that.  
Thor  
Thor didn’t really knock. He usually avoided Lady Darcy’s room when there was thumping coming from within, or when she had hung a sock on the doorknob. (His Lady Jane had explained exactly what that sock was for, in extremely graphic detail. And then demonstrated.) But knocking wasn’t really in his repertoire. So when Bruce sent him down to Tony’s office on the lower floors of Stark Tower, the business floors, where Stark Industries operated out of New York, he simply bypassed the empty desk in the room in front of the office (it must have been Natasha’s desk, Thor thought, proud of himself for identifying that) and opened the door.   
And there was Natasha. And Tony. Natasha sprawled naked on the desk, Tony with her thighs wrapped around his hips, dress pants shoved down to his knees and shoving into her for all that he was worth. And the way that Natasha was moaning, it sounded like he was worth a lot.   
Thor made a startled sound, and Tony smirked at him and Natasha rolled her head back to give him an upside down look over the back edge of the desk. “You like him watching you, baby? You gonna come with him watching?”  
“God, yes,” Natasha said back, hitching her hips higher around Tony’s waist and digging her stiletto heels into his thighs.   
“Shut the door, Thor,” Tony instructed. “Jane doesn’t mind a little... voyeurism now and then, does she?”   
Still shocked—Thor had much experience with this sort of behaviour on Asgard, but he had come to understand that the social values on Earth were far more monogamous than he was used to—Thor did as instructed and walked further into Tony’s office. Tony thrust his hips harder into Natasha, and Natasha clenched, her entire body coiled, and came with a scream. Tony followed, thrashing his head back and forth and gritting his teeth, before pulling out and resting his head on Natasha’s now propped up shoulder.   
“Tony?” Thor asked cautiously. “You and Natasha are... involved?”  
Tony laughed huskily. “For about three months now,” Natasha answered. “It wasn’t a... secret, per say, just something that we didn’t want to publicise while we weren’t sure that it would work out. The press will find out eventually, and we’ve prepared for that. Most of the others know, they’ve just been respecting our privacy and keeping it to themselves.”  
Thor nodded thoughtfully, not even slightly bothered by his fellow Avengers’ nakedness, or what he had just walked in on them doing. “You make a good match. If you would like for this to remain secret for longer, I shall, of course, keep my silence.”  
“Thank you, Thor, we appreciate it. But it really isn’t necessary. I think that Bruce is the only one who doesn’t know. Maybe Steve, I’m not sure.”  
“Bruce sent this for you, Tony,” Thor said, setting the folder that he had been carrying on the desk next to Natasha’s body.   
“Thanks, Thor,” Tony repeated.   
Bruce  
In the end, Bruce was the oblivious science type who missed the obvious until Tony and Natasha got caught up on movie night and started exchanging saliva in a very obvious way. Natasha was straddling Tony’s lap, and Tony’s hands on her hips, and the others weren’t acting even slightly surprised when.   
“What is going on? Tony, Natasha, did you get hit with some sort of alien sex pollen or something?”  
“Dude, they’ve been dating for three months,” Clint said. “Now shut up, I want to hear.”  
Pepper  
Pepper, was, of course, more intelligent than the average bear, and she knew Tony Stark better than anyone else in the world. She also prided herself on knowing Natasha Romanov rather well, too. In short, when Tony called her up to say that he and ‘Tasha’ (it was adorable that he had a nickname for her) had kissed, had sex, and decided that they were going to try to date, it wasn’t even slightly surprising.   
It was also very amusing, when Tony sent her video footage of all of the Avengers figuring out what was going on between them. And very sexy, that tape of the time that Thor had walked in on them. So sexy, in fact, that she had gotten Natasha to send her some more tapes.   
Well, let’s face it. If anyone was going to be kinky, it would be Tony and Natasha.


End file.
